The Front Page of Graham Perkin

“Books about journalism are capable of multilayered appeal,” wrote that master reporter, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Damien Murphy. “For practitioners, they can contain a sort of myopic fascination and a certain self-affirming pleasure yet simultaneously confirm an outsider's worst prejudices.”

Ben Hills achieves this and more with Breaking News: The Golden Age of Graham Perkin (Scribe; $59.95) in which he explores the short and brilliant life of one of Australia’s finest newspaper editors.

With the force of a journalistic tsunami Perkin shook up the cosy world of Australian journalism, focusing on investigations, assigning reporters to seriously cover areas health, social welfare,  higher education and the environment, while elsewhere mundane politics, crime and courts were the staples.

Hills traces Perkin’s rise from the Mallee district of Victoria where, at 12-years-old, he filed sports stories for the Warracknabeal Herald to the editor’s chair in Melbourne at 36, and then to his death nine years later, just as he was about to accept the greatest prize, running the Fairfax empire.

In telling this story, Hills reveals much about the sordid world of business, backroom deals and backstabbing, and has done a service by bring this into the daylight.

Here is “Rags” Henderson, Fairfax chief, urging Perkin to pick a fight with his managing director so that the board of directors would back Perkin.  “You’ve got to be contemptible if you want to get on in this business,” says Henderson. His approach seems to have been adopted by some of his successors at Fairfax.

It says much, too, that today’s Fairfax Media refused to allow Hills to see historical records, such as minutes of board meetings, even though almost all participants are dead and the events were 40 years ago. Even governments are not so sensitive.

He paints a clear picture of Perkin, the son of the town baker and descended from shopkeepers and trades folk, who bizarrely claimed a dodgy link to royalty centuries earlier, a quirk at odds with his dour Methodist side. Here is the schoolboy cricketer Perkin with his 24-pace run-up to bowl, earning this from the stand: “You’ve forgotten your pushbike, mug.”

As the golden-haired son, Perkin was understandably hurt when Wesley College rejected him after he and his father made the trip to Melbourne, an event made even more galling when the school accepted his brother, Brian, some years later (although he was pulled out when money was tight).

So the young Perkin later again journeyed to the city, this time to archaic offices of The Age. It was a time when, as the great Australian journalist Murray Sayle was to write, the only qualities essential for real success in journalism were rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability, plus a capacity to steal other people’s ideas.

Perkin would later quote this and put some of it into action.

At 17 he became a cadet, learning how to find and note down the comings and goings of ships. Those who had ships leaving port before they arrived blighted their careers. Reporters had to provide typewriters and pay to learn shorthand and typing. Much of the furniture had been burnt, says Hills, to warm the sub-editors during the Second World War.

The proofreaders out the back warmed themselves with sherry from an enamel kettle. One would read the proof of an article, while the other corrected any misprints. Hearing a drunken voice galloping through a religious minister’s sermon was a Sunday highlight on some papers in those days.

Rat-infested, lacking a clippings library (thrown out a window by a librarian who cracked up), the place was ruled by the Syme family, its chairman’s office unchanged from the days of David Syme 50 years before.

In this Miss Havisham-like world the deadly dull Age lagged well behind its livelier rivals in Flinders Street, the warm and cuddly Sun News Pictorial -, with its love of beach girls (navels usually painted out) and the high-octane evening Herald.

When Perkin walked in that summer in 1949 it was to find sub-editors in suits and waistcoats, some with green eyeshades, pots of glue in front of them, with razor blades to cut the copy and metal spikes for the discarded words (a newspaper I worked for banned spikes after an editor impaled his hand on one when laying down the law).

These sub-editors dominated the paper, banning the word sex and ruling that no sentence was longer than 24 words. Colour and comment were cut: a juicy murder, which came in early, was simply put into the back pages for convenience. The chief sub would take the tram home to St Kilda for dinner with his wife while his team raced to the pub. Two-and-a-half hours later it was back to work.

The keen Perkin soon realized that if he could write a heading to fit his story it would be well used.

Hills has a pub full of anecdotes, including the late-night editor who ignored the 1956 news about Egypt annexing the Suez Canal on the grounds that the stretch of water was already in Egypt. Intriguingly, it’s Egypt that produces an early example of proprietorial interference when correspondent Bruce Grant, later High Commissioner to India, is recalled for opposing the absurd Suez intervention by Robert Menzies.

From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, the reporter on the spot has often been ignored.

Perkin, meanwhile was thrown into a world of dog racing, pro `wrestling’ at Festival Hall, reporting the weather, and began to get noticed, especially when he wrote about the likes of the `wrestlers’ Big Chief Little Wolf (Venturia Tenario) and Killer Kowalski as vaudeville. An offer from the Sun arrived and at 22 he was let loose by The Age to  write long “colour” pieces around the countryside: wild pig hunting in Hay, an Ouyen bush concert, a winery, a ghost town, struggling wheat farms. His career trajectory zoomed when he when to England on a scholarship, meeting the great and not-so-good of Fleet Street, royalty, church leaders and even 80-year-old Winston Churchill.

Back in Melbourne he started making his mark, covering British atomic test at Maralinga, researching and writing an obituary of Essington Lewis, founder of BHP, in 90 minutes, and being promoted to the Canberra bureau. There he worked for the renowned Ian Fitchett. Known as `the doctor’ for his tweedy suits and little moustache, Fitchett was famous for revealing the contents of a budget. Menzies rebuked him at the entrance to Parliament next day: “You’ll eat your words, Fitchett!”

“Gladly, Prime Minister,” came the Wildean response, “provided they are garnished with the sauce of your embarrassment.”  Perkin soon found how the old boys’ network operated, with senior journalists lunching with members of the Cabinet, by writing nothing of what they knew. Hills says that years later Perkin would send out of town reporters to Canberra for sensitive stories.

A groundbreaking series on road deaths, a piece on pioneering heart surgery and other blockbuster features ensured his rise as he took on executive responsibilities. Which meant getting the blame for a spoof picture caption mocking a touchy wharfies’ union boss, who paid for his home with the libel money.

Perkin was now recruiting from across the country, building a formidable staff for the day when he would run the show. When that happened he would be partnered with Ranald Macdonald, a character for the pages of a Wodehouse novel, who had wanted to be marketing and promotions manager.

But the conversation he had with his grandfather, the boss, typically went all over the place and the old bloke misheard, thinking the 26-year-old wanted to be managing director.  And so it was to be. Macdonald proceeded to launch a doomed afternoon paper and other disastrous ventures.

One of Hills’s scoops is to read the diaries of Angus McLachlan, written every day and lodged with he National Library in Canberra. Rarely have the inside events of a great and influential corporation been so detailed as by McLachlan, a brilliant journalist who rose to be general manager of Fairfax and a board member.

Tantrums and infidelities, backstabbing and plotting, they are laid bare. As Hills writes, “…greed, intrigue and treachery…would temporarily reprieve The Age (of Fairfax control), but ultimately lead to its demise as independent company”.

We learn that the Fairfax chairman, Colonel E.H. (Call me Tiger) Neill secretly tried to sell his major stake in the company to the rival Herald and Weekly Times; a century after David Syme clandestinely bought and shut the rival morning Herald.

As Fairfax manoeuvres for a stake in Syme, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Packer and the Herald and Weekly Times start circling. High farce ensues with a courier from Murdoch scouting a Syme board meeting with an offer. He is to seek an old man with a stick, Oswald Syme. But Syme enters through the rear and the letter is foisted on another executive, who simply pockets it.

Fairfax, Syme and the Herald group colluded to share news and pictures so long as no Melbourne evening paper was launched. Hills doesn’t mention it, but this led to a weird amalgam, the Sunday Press, run by the Herald and Age in order to shut down the interloper Max Newton’s Sunday Observer.

Of course it all turned to tears with the Herald and Weekly Times capitulating to Murdoch in 1986 and Fairfax going into receivership four years later after a failed buyout. James Packer’s sell off of his media interests meant that within 40 years three major media dynasties disappeared, leaving the field to Murdoch.

He tried to hire Perkin, who turned for advice to Tom Fitzgerald, founder of Nation magazine and a former Sydney Morning Herald finance editor who joined Murdoch as editorial director. After three years Fitzgerald said he had been humiliated and given no real editorial authority, that Murdoch was a cheat, utterly unreliable and untrustworthy, a man who flatters someone to their face and immediately afterwards savagely disparages them “Fitzgerald said that no one working for Murdoch would have any editorial independence.” He interfered with the most senior executives, humiliating them by going to relatively junior executives with instructions. And he liked going to the composing room and on an impulse remaking a page while the editor stands by.

As a sidebar, it is intriguing to learn that Packer hired him for an extravagant wage, a house, gardener, cook, and chauffeur-driven car. But when Perkin signed he was told to write everything he knew about the Syme family. Packer wanted inside oil in his fight to grab The Age. Perkin demurred to the old tyrant’s fury.

At 36 he finally gained the Editor’s chair in Melbourne, hiring the superb cartoonist Les Tanner (whose anti-hanging cartoon of Henry Bolte made Packer pulp an issue of the Bulletin) and other wunderkinds, such as Michael Leunig, Ron Tandberg and John Spooner. Perkin shuffled out the duds and dead wood, appointed foreign correspondents, did deals to get stories from the world’s great English-language papers and enlivened his baby.

Some crack reporters, such as the now seemingly ageless Michelle Garattan, veteran Canberra correspondent, were hired and the power of the sub-editors broken. It became largely a writers’ paper, limited by Perkin’s conservatism. His cry of “Jesus, chap, you’ll make me the laughing stock of Melbourne” when he thought a reporter had gone too far told the story.

Beside his desk in the newsroom a cartoon summed up his approach:  `When you’re up to your arse in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your main aim was to drain the swamp.’ The swamp of bitter political battles against corrupt politicians, police, and businessmen did not engulf him, but the decades of heavy smoking, a law of red meat and whisky took a toll.

Hills details the remarkable number of awards the paper won, under him, and since. Murdoch publicly scorns awards, but laughingly his minions in Australia run their own.

Another of Hills’s revelations is that Perkin’s assistant, Kathy Duffy, who joined the paper form the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, worked as a “post box” for an Australian spy in China, pretending to be his girlfriend. She denies passing on anything to her spymasters from the newspaper, but Perkin was given an ASIO file on one reporter who had resisted being drafted for Vietnam. Hills found ASIO claims not to have a file on Perkin. Hills concludes that Duffy was naïve but loyal to her boss

He also notes that three times he and two other journalists on the paper were asked to double as spies, recalling earlier times when security vetted all new staff.

Hills is interesting on the battles over endorsing political parties at election time, Perkin’s fight against capital punishment, draconian libel laws and for intellectually handicapped children.

Oddly Perkin became a close friend of the hapless Billy (`I didn’t win but I didn’t lose’) Snedden through membership of both the Savage Club and the Melbourne Cricket Club, although Perkin did reject overtures from the Melbourne Club and the Royal Melbourne Golf Club. It is unwise for editors to hobnob in such places

He had some huge blind spots.  When a small group of journalists started a house committee to try to improved newsroom conditions he was unhappy. One of his assistants rubbed it in by loudly asking whether he needed permission of the committee to change a story. He could be authoritarian, firing a sub-editor who defied him and moonlighted on a Saturday at a Sunday paper.

Some of those he sacked were re-hired. Others, such as this writer, who perhaps should have been fired, weren’t, and were later even hired back from the ghastly Sunday paper madness of Max Newton.

The cry by the neocons and economic rationalists who later took over the paper that they would destroy the culture of the Age was hard to take. But, in the end, they largely destroyed themselves.

Some blemishes and uneven writing aside, Hills has done an outstanding job of recreating the heady days of inspiring reporting. Some good investigative work continues at Perkin’s old paper, the award in his name is hugely sought after and those who worked with him are the better for it.